The list of those Blacks who were forced from office in this“ coup d’ etat” included Wilmington’ s three Black city councilmen, the city clerk, treasurer, city attorney, and the 10 Black members of the city’ s 27-member police force.
Wichita Monrovians, a Negro League Baseball team
On November 10, 1898, Alfred Moore Waddell, a leader of the white supremacist movement that forcibly ousted the city’ s elected government, became the“ revolutionary mayor of Wilmington.”
When W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in his 1903 book,“ The Souls of Black Folk,” that“ The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” he was hardly being prophetic, given the racial turmoil of the years since slavery was ended.
But it is hard to imagine that the new century could have gotten off to a worse start. In 1901, 105 Blacks were lynched in the United States. Between 1901 and 1925, more than 1,400 Black men, women and children were lynched in this country. If the lynchings weren’ t bad enough, race riots in Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Springfield, Illinois during the 20th century’ s first decade took the lives of hundreds of Blacks.
On February 12, 1909, a small group of Black activists and White supporters – among them Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary White Ovington and William English Walling – met in New York City where they founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
While the NAACP organized chapters across the country – by 1920 it had 395 branches and 90,000 dues-paying members – to form the front ranks of its legal and political fight against“ the color line,” Du Bois took command of The Crisis magazine, the group’ s literary arm.
It was The Crisis that gave the NAACP the megaphone it needed to reach a national audience to reveal the harsh realities of Black life in America. And it was to The Crisis to which the NAACP turned to in 1915 to lead its attack on D. W. Griffith’ s racist film“ The Birth of a Nation,” which President Woodrow Wilson screened at the White House just 10 days after its Hollywood premiere.
The monthly magazine became an even more important force in 1919 when Du Bois named Jessie Redmon Fauset literary editor of The Crisis. Over the next seven years, Fauset made the NAACP’ s magazine the leading publication of the Harlem Renaissance, launching the careers of Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.
With The Crisis as their launching pad, many of the Harlem Renaissance writers, poets and playwrights used their voice to champion the demand that Blacks, too, should have an unalienable right” to“ Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
On June 21, 1925, a year before the United States – a nation deeply troubled by“ the color line” – would celebrate the 150th anniversary of its founding, a strange coming together of the races occurred in the American heartland.
On a hot, windblown Sunday afternoon in Wichita, Kansas, the local Ku Klux Klan Klavern played a baseball game against the Wichita Monrovians, a Negro League Baseball team. In announcing the game, The Wichita Eagle newspaper warned that“ Only Baseball” would be permitted in the ballpark, which was located on a sandbar in the Arkansas River.
“ Strangleholds, razors, horsewhips and other violent implements of argument will be barred at the baseball game,” the paper reported.
How the game came about is unclear, but the final score was Monrovians 10, the Klan 8. ■
DeWayne Wickham, a former columnist for USA TODAY, is the founding dean of Morgan State University’ s School of Global Journalism & Communication
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